In this rejoinder, we engage with the recent International Theory symposium on Global IR, situating it within the broader literature and outlining intellectual pathways for advancing Global IR’s agenda. We explore how the main critiques identified by the symposium – namely, essentialism, geo-epistemologies, disciplinary reformism, and ahistoricism – have been and can be further addressed through recent developments in Global IR. This rejoinder is not an attempt to prioritise one version of Global IR over another; rather, it emphasises that Global IR comes in multiple versions, and these versions should continue to be a collective work in progress. Our engagement with the evolving debates in Global IR seeks to fulfil the promise of a more global and diverse discipline.

David Lake wrote that International Relations (IR)1 will be a more diverse and better field of study if we embrace varied “life experiences and intuitions,” especially those of “marginalized” scholars, about politics and how the world works. Although concurring with his admonition, I also believe that his call for “greater diversity” in IR and his approach to realizing it need to be subject to critical scrutiny, being reconsidered in terms of reflexivity—more specifically, self-reflection by “marginalized” scholars. For this reason, as a “non-white” scholar working in a “non-Western” (or, in Lake’s words, “underrepresented”) IR community, I want to make my own confession to better understand what is at stake in promoting diversity in the academy from a different angle.

Due to the lack of an effective prophylactic intervention and diagnosis, human liver fluke Clonorchis sinensis continues to afflict a large human population, causing a chronic inflammatory bile duct disease. With an aim to identify target antigens for sensitive serodiagnosis, adenylate kinase 3 of C. sinensis (CsAK3) was successfully expressed in soluble form in Escherichia coli by fusion to an RNA-interacting domain derived from human Lys-tRNA synthetase and purified by Ni2+-affinity chromatography. Anti-CsAK3 serum was raised by immunization of mice, and Western blotting confirmed that CsAK3 was expressed in adult-stage C. sinensis. Histochemical analysis showed that CsAK3 was localized to the subtegumental tissue of C. sinensis and was excreted into the bile duct of the host. When tested against sera from various parasite-infected patients by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, the recombinant CsAK3 elicited a specific response to C. sinensis-infected sera. The results suggest that CsAK3, either alone or in combination with other antigens, could be used for improving the clinical diagnosis of clonorchiasis.

This article attempts to fill a gap in International Relations (IR) literature on East Asian security. ‘East Asia’ appears to be mostly an indeterminate conceptual construct, allowing scholars to look selectively at those aspects and areas that could justify their security thesis, albeit security dynamics in the region are all too difficult to comprehend and predict. This problem has been frequently pointed out in IR literature, but its methodological implications and suggestions have neither been appropriately illuminated nor been systematically offered, and the main solution commonly found in the literature was the tautological one of ‘better defining’ the region. As an alternative, this article suggests that one needs to tighten geographical focus and differentiate the subjects of analysis. When it comes to the study of East Asian security, one needs to aim to develop specific and differentiated generalizations as opposed to generalizations of a broad character. To showcase the fact that research outcomes can be more determinate when the target of analysis is more focused and specified, this article takes Northeast Asian security as an example and challenges the so-called ‘peaceful East Asia’ thesis, one of the mainstream perspectives on East Asian security. This article ultimately argues that while apprehending East Asian security dynamics through delimiting the scope of analysis and circumscribing the subjects of investigation is often deemed to be a modest enterprise―in particular, in terms of generalizability―the merits are substantial: research outcomes will be able not only to give us a truer mapping of the real world, but also bring us closer to building knowledge which satisfies the scientific criterion of ‘falsifiability.’

Causality in social science is hard to establish even through the finest comparative research. To ease the task of extracting causes from comparisons, we present the benefits of tracing particularities in any phenomenon under investigation. We introduce three real-world examples from 2011: British riots, worldwide anticapitalist protests, and the highway crash near Taunton in southwestern England. Whereas all of these three examples have broad causes, we embark on the quest after specific factors. The Taunton accident can send a powerful message to social scientists, which is about the danger of making general statements in their explanations. Instead of saying much but explaining little, the merit of singling out the specific is substantial. As social scientists, when we are faced with “smoke” but no “fire,” let us then focus on the part that is distinct.

The style of writing in international relations (IR) has evolved in recent decades. The lessons of “vintage” IR, to which we return in this article, have been largely forgotten by those writing in the discipline today. A merit will be substantial, we argue, in drawing more heavily from works by previous masters. Several lessons in style follow.

This article argues that International Relations (IR) researchers concerned with why-questions about the state's external behaviour ought to employ a multicausal approach attentive to the interrelated relationship between external structures and internal agents, presenting the (meta-)theoretical rationales underlying its argument. Here the author suggests ‘a rich/bold ontology’ regarding foreign policy behaviour. Then the article elaborates on detailed and explicit guidelines on how to traverse the bridge that connects the insights of that rich ontology to the empirical research necessary to make claims about the real world of any one moment. In a related vein, the article claims that a multicausal approach should be established using what the author calls ‘loose-knit deductive reasoning’ through which epistemological and methodological openness can be preserved in a manageable way. More importantly, this article discusses the role of theory for IR scholarship and the standards for judging theoretical contributions and progress in the field of IR. Ultimately, the author argues that a complex and flexible approach – both as a useful mode of explanation and as a progressive model of theory construction – can make important contributions to a better understanding of foreign policy and world politics, not only because it enables researchers to become keenly sensitive to the complex reality underlying a nation's foreign policy and to the interrelated relationship between structures and agents in international relations, but also because it can serve to provide a secure base for the progressive accumulation of the evidence closely associated with multiple causation on which any adequate explanation about complex foreign policy behaviour must surely be founded and without which general theory cannot really flourish.

The diatoms are an ecologically important group of algae that have been extensively studied by ecologists and taxonomists. However, the large-scale patterns of diatom distribution and the factors underlying this distribution are largely unknown. The aims of this study were to identify the large-scale spatial patterns of benthic diatom assemblages in Korean streams and rivers, and to assess the importance of numerous environmental factors on diatom distribution. We classified 720 study sites based on diatom flora. Benthic diatoms, water chemistry, altitude, and riparian land cover and use were characterized by multivariate analyses, Monte Carlo permutation tests, and indicator species analysis. In total, we identified 531 diatom taxa. Diatom assemblages were mostly dominated by species of the genera Achnanthes, Navicula, Nitzschia, Cocconeis, Fragilaria (Synedra included), Cymbella, Gomphonema, and Melosira. Cluster analysis partitioned all 720 sites into eight groups based on diatom species composition. Canonical correspondence analysis indicated that altitude, land cover and use, current velocity, electrical conductivity, and nutrient levels explained a significant amount of the variation in the composition of assemblages of benthic diatoms. At the national scale, a downstream ecological gradient was apparent, from fast-flowing, mostly oligotrophic highland streams to slow-flowing, mostly eutrophic lowland rivers. Our data suggest that spatial factors explain some of the variation in diatom distribution. The present investigation of the spatial patterns of benthic diatoms, the ecological determinants of diatom occurrence, and the identification of diatom indicator species contributes to development of a program for assessing the biological integrity of lotic ecosystems in Korea.

We studied 52 children in order to assess the prevalence, natural history, and electrophysiologic effects of cardiac rhabdomyoma in tuberous sclerosis. Their ages ranged from one day to 12 years (median age 1.33 year). The tumors in the heart were found in 22 patients through cross-sectional echocardiography. The overall prevalence of cardiac rhabdomyoma was 42%. The prevalence of cardiac tumors in patients first seen in infancy was 77%, and that in patients over one year of age was 31%. Those with cardiac tumors diagnosed in infancy had more tumors per person than did the patients diagnosed after infancy, and the tumors were smaller in the patients diagnosed over one year of age. Follow-up cross-sectional echocardiography showed that almost all tumors showed spontaneous regression. Complete regression occurred more commonly in younger patients, and in those with smaller tumors. About 70% of patients with cardiac tumors had either normal findings or infrequent premature contractions on 24hour Holter monitorings. The rest of the patients with cardiac tumors showed either frequent premature contractions, atrioventricular block, or atrial tachycardia, but antiarrhythmic medication was rarely required. Cross-sectional echocardiography, therefore, seems to be the best diagnostic tool for screening cardiac rhabdomyomas in patients with tuberous sclerosis. The tumors may be managed more conservatively in view of their high rate of spontaneous regression and rather rare association with symptomatic arrhythmias.

A systematic study of photoluminescence (PL) and time-resolved PL spectra from In0.15Ga0.85N/In0.015Ga0.985N quantum wells (QWs) with different Si doping concentration in the barriers has been carried out. As the Si doping concentration increases, the PL emission intensity was increased and the PL peak energy was blueshifted. The energy separation between the spontaneous emission (SPE) and stimulated emission (SE) peaks decrease with increasing Si doping concentration. We also observed that the slow decay time τ2 in the QWs decreases with increasing Si doping concentration, from ∼ 130 ns for [Si] = 2 × 1018 cm−3 to ∼ 30 ns for [Si] = 1 × 1019 cm−3. The PL emission peak shifts to lower energies with delay time after a pulsed excitation and this shift decreases with increasing Si doping concentration. The increased recombination rate, the decrease of peak shift with delay time, and the reduced separation between the SPE and SE peaks with increasing Si doping concentration are attributed to the screening of piezoelectric field by carriers originated from Si doped barriers.

A stress-driven formation of self-assembled InGaAs islands has been studied by the growth on GaAs (100) substrates with sub-micron platinum stripe pattern. Islands or quantum dots preferentially nucleate at the boundary of metal patterns. In addition, a quantum dot-free region near the boundary of the metal pattern is found. Those results are attributed to the stress between metal stripe and GaAs surface, which produces a laterally stressed region around the metal stripe. Adatoms on this region preferentially migrate toward the edge of metal stripes with maximum stress. This result may show a possible way for the interconnection between randomly distributed self-assembled quantum dots and metal stripes.

Pb(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3 (PZT) thin film on Pt/RuO2 double electrode was successfully prepared by using a new alkoxide-alkanolamine, sol-gel method. It was observed that the use of Pt/RuO2 double electrode reduced leakage current, resulting in a marked improvement in the leakage characteristics and more reliable capacitors. Typical P-E hysteresis behavior was observed even at low applied voltage of 5 V, manifesting greatly improved remanence and coercivity. Fatigue and breakdown characteristics, measured at 5 V, showed stable behavior, and no degradation in polarization was observed up to 1011 cycles.

The microstructural degradation of a lattice-matched Ga0.28 In0.72As0.61P0.39/InP heterointerface during atomic intermixing induced by Zn diffusion has been investigated using high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and Auger electron spectroscopy. The localized interfacial stress caused by intermixing appears to create stacking faults in the Ga-mixed InP substrate, and dislocation tangles in the In-mixed GalnAsP layer. The results are attributed to the contrasted effect of tensile and compressive stresses upon the nucleation of partial dislocations from both sides of the intermixed interface. A qualitative model is proposed for the homogeneous nucleation of misfit dislocations from the locally stressed interface.